Cat In A Neon Nightmare Part 22

"Whoa again. We're out of the seminary here. Who?"

"My ... salvation. The invulnerable Las Vegas call girl.

She fell to her death in the hotel atrium after I left."

"Fell."

"Archangels fall. She could have been pushed."

"And you take the fall. Well, my money is on your stalker. She would be the kind of jealous b.i.t.c.h to teach you both a lesson for trying to get around her."

"That's why I need you to dig deeper, Frank. I know this woman was an IRA operative. She may have been very clever, very undercover, but she was loose in northern Ireland as Kathleen O'Connor about seventeen years ago. She had a second career squeezing money out of very wealthy Irish-Hispanic men in South America after that. She must have left some kind of trail. With the emphasis on foreign infiltrators now, surely you can find something on her. She isn't a ghost."

"No. I remember running a search already. Are the police on your tail for this call girl death?"

"Yes . . . and no, I think. Remember Molina?"

"Sure. Good cop."

"Well, she was one of those who advised me to take the call-girl route."

"No kidding. She must be sweating it now."

"She won't let me get away with murder if she thinks I did it, no matter what."

"I know. Good cop. Got a few hang-ups too, but, hey, it's what makes us all interesting. So . . . you join the mile-high club with that call girl?"

"Mile-high-?"

"Those Las Vegas megahotels are said to be halfway to heaven."

"Frank."

"I know. None of my business. You do see, though, don't you? If you hadn't made a fetish out of chast.i.ty, if you'd failed like a billion men and a few thousand priests before you, you wouldn't be in this mess. You wouldn't have had anything to lose."

"You really believe that now?"

"Yeah. For women and for men. It's a form of control, don't you see, Matt? And no one can control you if you can control yourself."

The paradox had Matt's head spinning.

It was trying to control himself that had gotten him into this out-of-control situation, after all.

"You're reasoning like a Jesuit," he complained.

"Come to think of it, being an FBI agent is a little like that. Anything else I can help with?"

Matt shook his head, then realized he was on the phone and needed to say something.

"No. Not for now. Just find out something-anythingon Kathleen O'Connor."

Chapter 29.

. . . Glory Days The glossy photo Alfonso slapped down on Molina's desk made her blink for a moment.

What did she want with a vintage photo of Dolores Del Rio?

"Fuentes," Alfonso explained without being asked. "About forty years ago. A looker." He pushed the highly colored portrait aside to reveal a full-length black-andwhite cheesecake shot beneath it. "Her calling card was her legs, though, not that face. She did a lot of product posing in L.A. before she ended up in Gandolph the Great's magic act." Another photo: gorgeous Gloria with an ordinary-looking youngish guy who was already showing a little too much chub for the camera.

"Were they friends, lovers?" Molina asked.

"Coworkers. Barrett dug up a bunch of old-time magicians. They've got this old folks club going at the local barbecue now. Meet every Tuesday, only we got a membership list and made some rounds. Everybody said Gandolph-real name Garry, two R's, Randolph as in Churchill-"

"Again your easy erudition amazes me, Alfonso."

He shrugged modestly. "I try to know things that might come in handy, and you never know what might come in handy in our line of work. Anyway, they were colleagues. Buddies. That's all."

"She didn't outlive him by much," Molina commented, moving the glamour photo front and center. The body on the autopsy table with the words "she left" scripted under her rib cage hadn't even hinted at such past glory as this. Dish to dust.

"Now that might be funny," Alfonso said. "Old Gandolph dead under uncertain circ.u.mstances on Halloween, his former a.s.sistant strangled to death only months later in the parking lot of a church. Odd part is, she wasn't churchgoing, the ex-neighbors in the apartment building were sure of that. It was kind of an unofficial retirement home for ex-performers, that place: cheap, a little rundown like they were, kind of a community, though, and they kept an eye on each other."

"Is this stuff in the original reports?"

"Some. Some Barrett and me made up." He grinned. Molina knew he was referring to the Abies' mysterious ways of squeezing new facts out of old cases.

If they could wring some fresh suspects from the Fuentes case files, it would create enough of a flutter in the department and the media to let Va.s.sar die a natural death in the news.

"So how did she get to a church parking lot?" Molina asked.

"Someone was trying to look her up a few days before she died. A mysterious stranger."

Alfonso enunciated the final phrase with relish as he sat on the plastic sh.e.l.l chair in front of Molina's desk. Plastic wasn't supposed to groan like wood under ma.s.sive weight, but this chair managed at least a squawk. Maybe the steel bolts were giving.

"Any description of this mysterious stranger? Was he tall?"

"Got someone like Barrett in mind, Lieutenant?" Alfonso flipped pages and shook his head. " 'Fraid not. Middling kind of guy: middle-aged, middle-height, middle-weight, but dressed in a hooded sweatshirt and loose running pants, light gray, like he had come from the gym. Kept his hood on too, so he could be bald as an eagle or as hairy as Elvis on top. Wore sungla.s.ses, so his eye color is a mystery too."

"Just asking for her?"

"She had an unpublished number, so her address wasn't in the phone book. He was asking for her apartment, but n.o.body would tell him. They look out for each other at the Iverton Arms."

"The place sounds like a time warp."

Alfonso nodded. "Retired performers live in the past. You should have seen the old ladies fawning over me, inviting me in for pastry and a photo-alb.u.m session of their clippings from the days when they were cuties instead of Medicare patients. Not so many old guys in residence. Guess my gender isn't in it for the long run."

"Maybe too many cigarettes and pastries," Molina suggested.

"Always the diplomat, Lieutenant," Alfonso said blithely.

Three ex-wives and a series of police doctors hadn't gotten him to change his habits or his profile in thirty years. One remark from her wasn't going to do it now.

"That's more than we got on Fuentes the first time around," she noted approvingly. "You and Barrett keep on it."

"And what about that call girl, Va.s.sar?"

"Alch and Su are backgrounding her. It's a little tougher. Rothenberg's employees don't offer the police pastry and photo alb.u.ms, more like zipped lips and the b.u.m's rush."

"I thought you softened her up yourself."

"The city attorneys haven't softened her up in fourteen-years. What makes you think I could do it?"

"I thought maybe woman to woman-"

"Sisterhood means zilch when you're on opposite sides of the long lean line of the law, Alfonso. I just wanted to know what she thought about the death."

"And?"

"Oddly complacent. More concerned about making a point that it was unlikely for a seasoned call girl to get hurt, or underestimate a john with designs on throwing her off an atrium railing. She's all politics."

"Want Barrett and me to do some digging there?"

"Higher placed minions of the law than you and me have done that for years and came up with hara.s.sment suits and ACLU press conferences. Besides, the Goliath death is iffy, at best."

Alfonso stood, taking a stab at pulling his belt up over his ballooning belly. "If the words 'she left' show up on this Va.s.sar's corpse, though, let me know."

"You and half the force."

Chapter 30.

All in Another Night's Work: Split Personality Max was finding his new double ident.i.ty, established on an impulse, quite handy.

He was back at Neon Nightmare on a crowded Friday night in his Phantom Mage persona.

Given the circus of acrobats, dancers, and magicians who performed nightly at the place's pinnacle and then came down to earth when their gigs were over to mingle with the audience, the Phantom and his hokey half-mask fit right in.

Max knew he was like a moth drawn to flit around the fatal flame the Synth threw off, but the building was itself a maze that demanded further exploration before he could hope to penetrate to the heart of the labyrinth, the Synth and all its works, and its workers.

What he didn't learn now by clandestine explorations, his own self could return later to learn by subterfuge.

So he began at the bar, buying a drink and moving along it to entertain its patrons with a card illusion, an instant manifestation of a filled gla.s.s, a silk-flower bouquet, whatever cheap tricks would make him a familiar and accepted figure in their midst.

He gyrated out onto the dance floor a time or two, thankful that the music's volume made conversation impossible. The place was a mime's paradise, actually, a high-volume meat market for the young and the restless, transient singles in search of momentary connection.

After ninety minutes another breath-defying bungeetrapeze act was flashing through the neon stampede high above. Drums beat like pounding horse hooves, so loud they made the floor shake and teeth ache and almost impinged on sanity.

During this perfect distraction, Max turned the white side of his mask to the wall and slunk along it in search of a door to an area he had not yet investigated.

The place was as riddled with hidden chambers as a Swiss cheese. He still hadn't erected a mental map of the place, unusual for his swift and certain skill at 3-D visualization.

And the doors were the same seamless built-ins that could only be cracked like a safe in the pitch dark: with the help of sensitive fingertips in finding the fulcrum that controlled the swing mechanism.

A piece of wall became a door under the pressure of his fingers. Once cracked, it remained only ajar. Max tried to listen for any sound beyond it, but the chaos of the nightclub concealed it and also filtered through now that it was open. Best he dart within before the sound leak betrayed his snooping, and explain himself to anyone inside later.

Not only doors opened at his fingertips, but a cover story was always a moment's inspiration away.

But the area beyond the door was empty and dark, and when Max pushed the door's opposite point, it swung smoothly shut.

He moved quickly, feeling the limits of his particular box of darkness with his hands and feet. As long as he expected anything-unseen stairs leading up or down, sud den openings, a demanding resident or guard-he would be surprised by nothing.

Voices murmured faintly ahead to his left. Probably the club room of the Veteran Magician's Society. The Phantom Mage was an upstart to them, and would not be as welcome as an established act like the Mystifying Max.

He almost chuckled aloud at how easily he could approach the Synth from two different personas, now that he had found their hideout.

But that was just it. Had he truly found the Synth? No one had mentioned the name during his introductory interview three nights ago. Max guessed that they were a front organization, and that not all the members even knew about the Synth.

Still, Rafi Nadir's presence outside the club Wednesday night was a bad omen. First he shows up in Las Vegas and gets his ex-girlfriend Molina's paddle holster in a snarl. Then he shows up at the t.i.taniCon science fiction convention as a hired guard in alien guise. Then he's out at Rancho Exotica in another semiofficial role. Next he's in a strip-club parking lot just in time to see Temple attacked by a serial killer. Then he's hired as security at the Cloaked Conjuror's secret estate. Now, here he is at Neon Nightmare. True, men who take muscle jobs move around like p.a.w.ns on a chessboard, busy as beavers while the more powerful people behind them move glacially slow, preferring to sacrifice the front men rather than their own safety.

But Nadir was turning up like funny money in a Monopoly game.

Max's fingers, which had never left the smooth sheet-rocked walls and had felt every taped seam, again encountered one of the featureless doors. The pressure points changed from door to door, never turning up in the same predictable position, as a doork.n.o.b would. He stretched high and low and finally found the right spot.

Low-level light outlined the rectangle of a slightly open door.

Max eeled inside, finding himself in another comfortably clubbish room, but this one offering a wall of Eye-inthe-Sky television screens reporting from various spy points throughout the building.

The seat before the console was a burgundy leather wing chair. Max sensed this was a recreational watching post for the most part. He sensed the mind of a nons.e.xual voyeur. A dilettante of surveillance, who enjoyed the power of looking out over this dark and neon-lit realm. Not that the board couldn't be manned by a serious surveillance team if necessary.

He quickly checked all the camera locations so he would know what to avoid on his next visit.

A half gla.s.s of wine sat on the cherry wood console. He came near, sniffed like a dog. A dessert wine, sweet and expensive.

He could picture some enormous Nero Wolfe of magical misdeeds sitting here overseeing his hidden realm.

Enough theorizing! Time to leave before the oeneophile returned.

Once again in the dark beyond a closed door, Max waited and listened, then moved farther into the building.